Of course, when you’re a child and your island is the world and your world doesn’t include a sophisticated understanding of the real world in its entirety, none of that means anything to you. It was only when I got to Canada and moved into her house that I understood.
Aunty Jillian wasn’t single.
Aunty Jillian was gay.
When you’re little there’s a lot you take for granted. Then, I never really thought about my mother or her family. Now, I had too many other things to worry about than the family I’d never had. My grandfather died before I was born, and I barely got to know Granny Rose. We never visited any distant cousins. It was just my mom, Cynthia, and her big sister, Jillian, who was not really a part of our day-to-day lives because she lived in Canada and she and my mom weren’t all that close anymore. Yeah, they were Facebook friends, but I really hadn’t paid her that much attention. Was I completely oblivious to the fact that she was obviously, visibly queer? Pretty much. What can I say? It didn’t matter to me, not before I moved here to Edmonton.
At least Cynthia had a sister who she grew up with. I grew up alone. And though it sounds strange to say because I am an only child, I have never been my mother’s favorite. I felt she had a quiet contempt for everything about me. My hair was only one of the problems. It’s actually funny because there’s nobody in the world I resemble more than my mother. We have such similar faces, we could pass for sisters. We’re both slender and dark, with the same thick, kinky hair, which she wears dead straight. She’s shorter than me, though. I guess I got my height from my dad—my mother never talked about him, and I confess I didn’t have too much interest in the guy who abandoned us before I was born. Jerk.
What’s really weird is that my whole life my mother compared me to Jillian. It happened all the time. If I picked up a book that Jillian might have liked, my mother commented on it. When I wanted to go to the convent school after sitting my Secondary Entrance Assessment, Mom brought up the fact that it was where Jillian had gone—as if I could forget given the photos I’d seen all my life of Jillian so proud in her convent uniform. And when I failed the exam—or rather, failed to pass for the convent school—my mother never stopped mentioning it. She constantly talked about Jillian’s accomplishments, her likes and her dislikes, what she used to do as a child, what she used to say, what Jillian used to look like before she cut off her wild, curly hair. Somehow she never mentioned that Jillian was not just gay, but practically married to a woman named Julie.
All that is confusing to me.
For a ton of reasons.
But I’ve filled my five pages for the day, so I guess I’ll write more later.
I knocked on the back door before I slipped my key into the lock, just being polite as my mother had taught me to be. After all, this wasn’t my house, even if it was my home at the moment. As usual, nobody answered. Jillian and Julie were down in the basement at work.
They were trying to branch out their little web design company into ebook publishing. I didn’t know anything about ebooks—nobody I knew in Trinidad read them. We preferred macoing people on Facebook. I wondered if an ebook was the same as publishing your stories online. You could find some decent stories on the internet, like one I had read earlier that day at the library about a girl who fell in love with her neighbor and when their parents found out and broke them up, she tried to kill herself. I liked the writing, but I couldn’t believe the girl actually told her mother when she first felt suicidal. Who even does that? I never told any adults that I was sad all the time and that I would rather put an end to those feelings entirely. Who does that? Adults don’t think kids are real people anyway. My mother only paid attention to me after I started vomiting my guts out on her kitchen floor. I had no plans to do that on Aunt Jillian’s kitchen floor for now.
I liked Aunt Jillian, and the web design stuff was mad decent, though quite frankly I don’t care to know how the internet actually works, only that it does. Or I used to care. I used to have email for school, and Instagram like the other kids at my school—how else do you talk to anybody?—but when I had my troubles, as my mother refers to my recent past, I deleted all my accounts. Having Akilah on Skype was my one lifeline. Kind of extreme, but the doctor recommended I stay off social media. Maybe I never will turn them back on. I’m a Caribbean hermit in exile in Edmonton. I could disappear amidst the cookie-cutter houses.
When no one answered my knock, I went into the house. Their kitchen floor, like everything else in Jillian and Julie’s house, was spotless. Julie was a fiend for cleaning, Saturdays she’d attack dirt like she had a personal vendetta against it. She would maintain a low-grade surveillance on grime, and there would be occasional sniper fire at it for the rest of the week. My mom was a good housekeeper, but next to Julie she seemed slovenly. There was dust on our bookshelves at home! Not here. Julie even took a cloth and wiped the books themselves. The kitchen was her special domain, and it always smelled a little of pine cleaner. I’d never seen a bread crumb or juice stain on the counters, and a glass didn’t get the chance to sit in the sink for more than a minute or two before Julie swept in to wash up. That was the case this evening. From the bottle they always kept in the fridge I poured myself a glass of cranberry juice, drank it in thirsty gulps, and put the glass in the sink. I went to my room to put down my backpack and the books I had borrowed at the library, and by the time I came back the glass was washed and turned over on the drip tray. There was no sign of Julie herself, though.
“Thanks, Julie!” I yelled from the top of the basement stairs. “I would have washed it, you know!”
“I know, sweetie!” she yelled back. In a second, I heard Aunt Jillian’s heavy footsteps on the wooden stairs. Unlike my mother, who made me feel bad for feeling sad, Jillian and Julie acted like I was a regular girl. It was an unusual sensation, being thought of as normal, but a good one. It made me almost happy.
“Hey, sugar,” she said as her short fluffy Afro popped into view. “What’s up?”
“Oh, nothing much. A cop tried to hit on me at the bus stop,” I said, pretending to be casual, though talking about it reminded me of my panic attack—which I didn’t mention to Jillian. Instead of telling her I was struggling, and why, I continued with arguably the least important thing that had happened to me that afternoon. “He backed off in a hurry when I told him I was fourteen.”
“Almost fifteen,” Jillian murmured automatically.
“But still fourteen for now,” I replied, winking. “Poor guy.”
“Did you tell him that your aunt would kill him too?” Jillian asked drily.
“Oh, no, we didn’t get that well acquainted.”
“Really,” she said, pouring herself some juice. “What did you do today? Go to the gym?” She peered at my sneakers, which were starting to look a hot mess. The laces—let’s say they used to be white; and the soles were decidedly un-perky. I worked out on the treadmill at the gym every couple of days on top of regularly walking all over the city and through the suburbs. It was enough to take a toll on my footwear.